With the recent release of the new Digg API, developers all over the web have picked it up and started playing with it to integrate it with their own applications. On developer, Nick Halstead, decided to grab the latest stories and publish the headlines to his page. In the process, though, he learned a little something about XML handling in PHP4.

I quickly discovered that XML decoding under PHP 4 is a pain in the (****) when you do not have access to install further modules. So quickly moved onto JSON, but the lovely function json_decode is PHP 5 only. But I did a bit of search and found several PHP json classes without any dependencies.

With this, and some help from a bit more code, he was able to create the sample he shares in the post - a script to grab the latest stories and display their titles to his page.